Page 45 - Alex Ferguson: My Autobiography

With Gary Neville beginning to pick up injuries, and Vidić and Evra settling in, Rio and Edwin van
der Sar became the defensive fulcrum of the team in the second half of that decade. I played Rio once
in the centre of midfield, in 2006 against Blackburn Rovers, and he got himself sent off. Robbie
Savage was the victim of the tackle that put Rio back in the changing room.

This may surprise some, but Pallister was as good a footballer as Rio. Oddly, he was quicker, too,
but he was no fan of running. Pally was anti-work, and I say that affectionately. He used to say that the
less he did, the better he felt. He was the world’s worst trainer. I was always after him. In the first 15
minutes he would stagger out of our penalty area after an opposition attack, gasping for air. I would
say to Brian Kidd: ‘Look at that Pally – he’s dying!’ I confess I used to slaughter him.
Picking him up one night for a club dinner, I entered his house to find a giant bottle of Coca-Cola
on his fireside table and a big bag of sweets: Crunchies, Rolos, Mars Bars. I said to Mary, his wife,

‘What about this?’
‘I don’t know how many times I tell him, boss, he doesn’t listen,’ Mary said.
So we hear footsteps on the stairs and Pally descends to see me studying this vast stash of kiddie
food. ‘Why do you buy all that stuff, Mary?’ he says to his wife. So I fire back: ‘You big lazy so-and-
so, I’m fining you for that!’
Gary was no Adonis but he was a seriously good player with a sweet nature. A lovely lad. Like

Rio, he could pass a ball and was quick when he wanted to be. In his last season with us, he sustained
a cut on his eyebrow and was howling, complaining that it was the first time he had been cut in his
life. It didn’t go with his image. Pally thought he was Cary Grant.
I wasn’t consciously looking for a centre-back who could carry the ball out of defence, or send an
incisive pass like Franz Beckenbauer. Pace, and the ability to read the game, are non-negotiables at
the top in modern football. Rio had both, which is why I signed him. Not only could he defend, but he
could bring the ball out. So although defending came first with me, it was encouraging to know my

new centre-back could also start moves from the back, which became the norm later, with Barcelona
and others.
At points in Rio’s career, it was fair to say that his life expanded in more directions than we were
happy with. I told him I was fed up with reading about him at dinners and launches. ‘You know the
thing about football? It catches you. What happens on the football field tells everybody,’ I told him.
When you start to decline, it happens quickly. At a small club you can get away with it. But at

Manchester United there were 76,000 pairs of eyes on us and you could never kid them. I told Rio that
if any of these distractions reduced his effectiveness as a footballer, he would not be with us much
longer because I would not be picking him.
But he responded well to those warnings. We devised a system in which his agent was obliged to
tell us everything he was doing, which gave us greater control. There was a music company, a film, a
TV production company and a magazine that took him to America to interview P Diddy. ‘Give me a
break, Rio,’ I said when I heard he was going to meet that star of the American rap scene. ‘Is he going

to make you a better centre-half?’
Rio was not alone in exploring other outlets. It all stemmed from the celebrity status of the modern
footballer. Some look to expand it. Beckham was one, and Rio became another. David’s success in
that respect was miraculous.
Not all Rio’s outside work was celebrity driven. His work for UNICEF in Africa was terrific. You
can never dismiss the impact a Rio Ferdinand could make on the life of a black child in Africa. Our

message was simply that he had to balance fame with a need to remember what made him successful
in the first place. Some won’t do that. Some can’t.